CVE-2026-32689

Long-poll NDJSON body splitting causes unbounded memory allocation in Phoenix

State
Published
Severity
8.7 High
Published
May 5, 2026
Updated
May 7, 2026
Reserved
Mar 13, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in phoenixframework phoenix allows a denial of service via the long-poll transport's NDJSON body handling.

In 'Elixir.Phoenix.Transports.LongPoll':publish/4, when a POST request is received with Content-Type: application/x-ndjson, the request body is split on newline characters using String.split/2 with no limit on the number of resulting segments. An attacker can send a body consisting entirely of newline bytes, causing a 1:1 amplification into a list of empty binaries — a 1 MB body produces approximately one million list elements, an 8 MB body approximately 8.4 million. Each element is then walked by Enum.map, materializing another list of the same size. This exhausts BEAM memory and schedulers, crashing the node and terminating all active sessions.

A session token required to reach the vulnerable endpoint is freely obtainable by any client via an unauthenticated GET request to the same URL with a matching Origin header, making this attack effectively unauthenticated.

This issue affects phoenix: from 1.7.0 before 1.7.22 and 1.8.6.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.08.7 HighCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NEEF

Weaknesses

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Affected Products

ProductVersions
phoenixphoenixframework
  • 1.7.0 to before 1.7.22Affected
  • 1.8.0 to before 1.8.6Affected
phoenixphoenixframework
  • 2674c6ea30634667f9b09966b90269393b445953 and laterAffectedfrom 1a67c61ff9ce0a7711662ac7354861917a7c80f7Not affectedfrom 912ea181fd247c21dbcc49fb97d0053b947d81bfNot affected

References

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